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Harvard University, Regis of America's higher educational system, has been rocked by an enormous cheating scandal.

What is the big deal? Harvard may not officially encourage plagiarism, but it hardly frowns on the practice, either. Consider: legendary law professor Laurence Tribe was guilty of plagiarism, as were former Harvard prof and current Massachusetts senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren Law and Harvard grad and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. These luminaries of Harvard get caught, mumble a stilted apology, and move right along, so why shouldn't the student body in general.

What is happening at Harvard?

It's simple -- Harvard has sold its soul to progressivism, a bankrupt philosophy, yet it still demands high performance from its students to maintain its illustrious image. And liberalism is a relativistic belief system that holds no absolute truth and that emphasizes the material nature of Man rather than the spiritual, so there is no moral condemnation except where the collective decides to condemn. Morals are merely a social convention, agreed upon by the majority. The hallmark of leftists is the notion that they can slowly change the convention to make the world more to their liking. Well, if you believe that, why not take shortcuts? Morality is relative, after all. If you agree with what is being said, why bother to say it in your own words? Why bother to take the extra step of crediting a source? Who is to say you aren't the originator of it? It isn't the choice of words, but the meaning you wish to convey, anyway.

Oh, and how is the theft of intellectual property fundamentally different from redistribution of wealth, or land, or from Napster, for that matter? How is it different from the answer to Joe the Plumber?

This is evidence of the bankruptcy of liberalism and the failure of creativity that liberalism spawns.

One must ask: why would so many students think it acceptable to cheat so openly? The answer lies in the remarks of another of Harvard's luminaries.

"You didn't build that," President Barack Hussein Obama infamously claimed of successful businessmen, making the point that a successful business prospered because of the benefits of society in general and the work of government in particular. (Perhaps, but which came first, the chicken or the egg? Those roads and bridges were built after pioneers blazed trails, built dirt and gravel roads, and established towns, and this without any government assistance. Oh, and they pay taxes to maintain them.) The concept held by Mr. Obama and those on the left is not one of personal action, but of Gaia, of a sort of group organism, a gestalt in which human beings are interchangeable parts of a greater whole. Human minds are little more than a chain of conditioned responses, and free will is but an illusion -- the result of biological and social forces masquerading as an independent mind. Society is not at the service of the individual, but the individual to society. This is a critical point to understand, because it means that individual thoughts are largely pointless, a mere construct of the group. That is why liberals so concern themselves with the opinions of "experts" and are quite prepared to, say, fundamentally reorganize human society based on the opinions of climatologists and global warming models. Society is a collective of small, meager minds who must be guided by the intelligentsia, the experts (and, happily, they are the ones who compose the membership of this intelligentsia). This stems from Plato's vision of the philosopher-king -- an oligarchy ruled by the self-styled bright ones. One either is in the small clique of intellectual leaders or is in the rabble of peasantry. But in the end, the individual is unimportant; the collective is all.

And so there is no reason for original thinking; it isn't yours anyway. The result is groupthink, where liberals all look at issues in the same way and hold nearly identical opinions. Talking points go out but are scarcely needed because the liberals immediately latch onto the thoughts of other liberals and repeat them in parrot-like fashion. How many times have we witnessed this? Remember when George W. Bush was first running for president and the word "gravitas" was on the lips of every journalist? These sorts of things pass far more easily than head colds among the intellectual classes.

What do you expect from the sixties radicals who spent most of their time occupying the dean's office and protesting? They never had the time or inclination to do serious scholarship, and when they took over the academy, they rewarded sycophancy and posturing and punished students who actually made them work. The surprise is not that there are plagiarism scandals, but that there aren't more of them coming to light.

You should read his book on the subject, but first, read Paul Johnson's, as they work really well as companion pieces. Johnson wrote a collection of biographies of secular intellectuals, starting with Rousseau, and working forward through Shelley, Marx, Hemingway and a host of others. The common threads that he identified were the complete absence of moral constraints, integrity and decency. Sowell then connects the psychology of the intellectuals with the outcomes of their policies. The end result is that intellectuals are driven by the desire for public adulation, and their policy positions have nothing to do with whether they will work, but whether they get acclaimed for them (This is why prizes like the Nobel Peace Prize are so pernicious and dangerous; they increase the incentives for bad policies that appeal to policy elites). That acclamation is more important than the end results, and given the philosophical abandonment of truth as a value, in favor of "conflicting narratives," it should come as no surprise that many intellectuals were serial plagiarists. Marx was particularly notorious for it.

This brings us back to the OP. Given that the moral failings of intellectuals permeate the academic institutions that they have overtaken, the result is the rise in plagiarism scandals, as well as fabrication scandals in the media, which also involve Ivy League-educated journalists was inevitable.

Harvard University, Regis of America's higher educational system, has been rocked by an enormous cheating scandal.

What is the big deal? Harvard may not officially encourage plagiarism, but it hardly frowns on the practice, either. Consider: legendary law professor Laurence Tribe was guilty of plagiarism, as were former Harvard prof and current Massachusetts senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren Law and Harvard grad and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. These luminaries of Harvard get caught, mumble a stilted apology, and move right along, so why shouldn't the student body in general.

What is happening at Harvard?

It's simple -- Harvard has sold its soul to progressivism, a bankrupt philosophy, yet it still demands high performance from its students to maintain its illustrious image. And liberalism is a relativistic belief system that holds no absolute truth and that emphasizes the material nature of Man rather than the spiritual, so there is no moral condemnation except where the collective decides to condemn. Morals are merely a social convention, agreed upon by the majority. The hallmark of leftists is the notion that they can slowly change the convention to make the world more to their liking. Well, if you believe that, why not take shortcuts? Morality is relative, after all. If you agree with what is being said, why bother to say it in your own words? Why bother to take the extra step of crediting a source? Who is to say you aren't the originator of it? It isn't the choice of words, but the meaning you wish to convey, anyway.

Oh, and how is the theft of intellectual property fundamentally different from redistribution of wealth, or land, or from Napster, for that matter? How is it different from the answer to Joe the Plumber?

This is evidence of the bankruptcy of liberalism and the failure of creativity that liberalism spawns.

One must ask: why would so many students think it acceptable to cheat so openly? The answer lies in the remarks of another of Harvard's luminaries.

"You didn't build that," President Barack Hussein Obama infamously claimed of successful businessmen, making the point that a successful business prospered because of the benefits of society in general and the work of government in particular. (Perhaps, but which came first, the chicken or the egg? Those roads and bridges were built after pioneers blazed trails, built dirt and gravel roads, and established towns, and this without any government assistance. Oh, and they pay taxes to maintain them.) The concept held by Mr. Obama and those on the left is not one of personal action, but of Gaia, of a sort of group organism, a gestalt in which human beings are interchangeable parts of a greater whole. Human minds are little more than a chain of conditioned responses, and free will is but an illusion -- the result of biological and social forces masquerading as an independent mind. Society is not at the service of the individual, but the individual to society. This is a critical point to understand, because it means that individual thoughts are largely pointless, a mere construct of the group. That is why liberals so concern themselves with the opinions of "experts" and are quite prepared to, say, fundamentally reorganize human society based on the opinions of climatologists and global warming models. Society is a collective of small, meager minds who must be guided by the intelligentsia, the experts (and, happily, they are the ones who compose the membership of this intelligentsia). This stems from Plato's vision of the philosopher-king -- an oligarchy ruled by the self-styled bright ones. One either is in the small clique of intellectual leaders or is in the rabble of peasantry. But in the end, the individual is unimportant; the collective is all.

And so there is no reason for original thinking; it isn't yours anyway. The result is groupthink, where liberals all look at issues in the same way and hold nearly identical opinions. Talking points go out but are scarcely needed because the liberals immediately latch onto the thoughts of other liberals and repeat them in parrot-like fashion. How many times have we witnessed this? Remember when George W. Bush was first running for president and the word "gravitas" was on the lips of every journalist? These sorts of things pass far more easily than head colds among the intellectual classes.

All that text and no mention of what actually took place? Seriously, we accuse so many of these students of majoring in basket weaving and naval gazing does it actually matter if they cheat? Medical school students cheating is bad news. Engineering students cheating is bad news. Even biology (and therefore ecology) students cheating is bad news. Gender studies or "public administration"? Who gives a rat's ass?

But seriously, does anyone know what the actual cheating involved?

Here you go (and I think you will agree that basket weaving was pretty close):

Almost half of the 279 students who took assistant professor Matthew Platt’s Introduction to Congress class in the spring are under investigation for cheating. According to a letter to students from Harris, the charges are “academic dishonesty, ranging from inappropriate collaboration to outright plagiarism, on a take-home final exam.” (The university has not acknowledged the specific class.)

One senior who’s under investigation, and who spoke to Salon only on condition of anonymity, said that the scandal was a crackdown on a course that has a reputation for being easy. The course had a “culture” in which collaboration was “fostered, encouraged, expected.” Students were encouraged to treat exams like “problem sets,” which the student understands to allow collaboration. “The bubble burst this year and we’re being scapegoated.”

While you were hanging yourself , on someone else's words
Dying to believe in what you heard
I was staring straight into the shining sun

All that text and no mention of what actually took place? Seriously, we accuse so many of these students of majoring in basket weaving and naval gazing does it actually matter if they cheat? Medical school students cheating is bad news. Engineering students cheating is bad news. Even biology (and therefore ecology) students cheating is bad news. Gender studies or "public administration"? Who gives a rat's ass?

But seriously, does anyone know what the actual cheating involved?

Here you go (and I think you will agree that basket weaving was pretty close):

Almost half of the 279 students who took assistant professor Matthew Platt’s Introduction to Congress class in the spring are under investigation for cheating. According to a letter to students from Harris, the charges are “academic dishonesty, ranging from inappropriate collaboration to outright plagiarism, on a take-home final exam.” (The university has not acknowledged the specific class.)

One senior who’s under investigation, and who spoke to Salon only on condition of anonymity, said that the scandal was a crackdown on a course that has a reputation for being easy. The course had a “culture” in which collaboration was “fostered, encouraged, expected.” Students were encouraged to treat exams like “problem sets,” which the student understands to allow collaboration. “The bubble burst this year and we’re being scapegoated.”

One could argue that naval gazing 101 shouldn't require cheating ("Eyes on your own navel!"), but if it were that simple, then the idea that students in one of the most expensive, elite colleges in the nation, a college whose degree opens doors throughout business, academia and government, were so incapable or unwilling to do coursework in a gut course that they resorted to cheating, would be disturbing on its own. After all, how much is a Harvard degree really worth if you not only take idiotic classes, but don't have to do the work that they require? But, unfortunately, that's not why this matters, and it does matter. First, look at the course itself:

This course seeks to provide students with a comprehensive introduction to Congress. The first half of the course addresses the nuts and bolts of how Congress operates in terms of foundational theories, the committee system, congressional elections, and congressional procedures. In the second half of the course we apply this knowledge to an exploration of how and why Congress pays attention to certain issues rather than others. Students are encouraged to view Congress not only as an institution unto itself but also as an institution that interacts with a variety of actors to shift public policy. The recorded lectures are from the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences course Government 1310. (4 credits)

This isn't some phys-ed class for jocks, it's part of the Harvard School of Government. It provides credit at the undergraduate and graduate level for students of government. Students who take this course are going to go on to careers in government. Ask yourself how many of the students who cheated their way through this class are now working in Washington? How many of them hold positions of responsibility? How many of them were taught to cheat in Harvard, and are now applying that ethos to their regulation of our lives?

Second, look at the cost per credit. Taking that kind of money and encouraging cheating constitutes fraud. We're allowing academic institutions to cheat their students, foist those cheated students on the rest of us and create a culture of fraud throughout our culture.

All that text and no mention of what actually took place? Seriously, we accuse so many of these students of majoring in basket weaving and naval gazing does it actually matter if they cheat? Medical school students cheating is bad news. Engineering students cheating is bad news. Even biology (and therefore ecology) students cheating is bad news. Gender studies or "public administration"? Who gives a rat's ass?

Ladies and gentlemen of CU, this is complete validation of the author's point. Congratulations, Nova, for reinforcing the image of "character doesn't count" attitude of the left.